On Thu, 2013-08-22 at 08:21 -0500, Chris Adams wrote:
Once upon a time, "Jóhann B. Guðmundsson"
<johannbg(a)gmail.com> said:
> You would just overwrite in in your own .bashrc if you have long
> hostname and they get in your way.
>
> Long hostnames are far more practical for administrators to use then
> short hostnames have ever been.
That's your opinion; please don't state it as if it is an agreed-upon
fact. Mine differs; personal like/dislike is not a good reason to
change existing defaults.
Some people have long domain names (and not just a lot of dotted
components, but long individual sections); taking up a bunch of space on
every prompt line just to re-print the same domain is a waste. However,
even with a short domain, it is just too much IMHO (and I worked for
several years for someone with just about as short of a domain name as
you can get).
I find the Red Hat/Fedora default prompt too long already; IMHO:
- The square brackets are useless wrapping; there's also a
character+space separator at the end of the prompt.
I agree that opening square bracket is useless, but I want to have the
directory and $/# character separated. This prompt is well established,
however I agree that we can probably get one character less with
something like
foo@localhost lib>$
- The "user@" is mostly useless; if you su/sudo to root,
the character
at the end of the prompt changes from $ to #. The only time I would
be interested in seeing user@ is if I've su/sudo to a user (other than
root) that doesn't match the login user for this TTY; on Linux this
can be as easy as the following bit of bash:
local user=""
if [ "$UID" != 0 -a ! -O /proc/self/fd/0 ]; then
user='\u@'
fi
PS1="$user"'\h \W\$ '
Good suggestion, I like it - and maybe it would make sense to change the
default to this if wider audience will agree on that.
Still I don't agree that this is useless - I usually have several
terminals with ssh connection and they are differentiated in user (e.g.
per tool I'm using on that machine). Having only hostname will make it
harder for me (as the hostnames differ only in number). Most of the
users probably don't have this scenario, so I'm a bit toward to +1 here.
Greetings,
Ondrej